Is quality vs. quantity a zero-sum game? Perhaps, but the trend toward
smaller studio spaces is an increasing reality in today’s production
universe.

Is quality vs. quantity a zero-sum game? Perhaps, but the trend toward
smaller studio spaces is an increasing reality in today’s production
universe. Dilbert could empathize.

So, sitting in your tiny studio, how, exactly, do you maximize sound?
And how much will it cost you? Audio is its own animal; it’s not as
easily scalable as picture. Still, the professional audio equipment
industry has grabbed on to this downsizing trend, producing lots of
scaled-down digital components. Multi-layered mixing consoles can now
give you 96 inputs in a space barely larger than most office desks.
Plug-in processors have replaced ungainly outboard signal processor
racks. But Isaac Newton is not amused: it still takes more than 20 feet
for a 60-Hz waveform to fully unroll, even if your editing suite is a
mere 15 x 12 feet.

There are two main areas to target when maximizing small-room sonics:
acoustical treatments, and speaker choices and placement. Thanks to
divergent tastes and philosophies, there are more than a few different
ways to approach the same problem. For example, is it better to diffuse
or to trap your sound? What kind of speaker monitoring systems are best
for small spaces? Opinions fall firmly in multiple camps. The good
news, though, is there is a rich variety of off-the-shelf tools that
offer fairly sophisticated acoustics to those who don’t want to resort
to-or can’t afford-professional design and systems integration. Total
prices for these tools range from a few hundred dollars for prepackaged
products to about several thousand for bigger, more sophisticated
sytems.

Before you invest, always consider the size of your studio first.
Auralex, perhaps the largest purveyor of pràªt-a-porter acoustical
solutions for absorption, diffusion, bass trapping and mechanical sound
transmission, has configured its product line into packages that are
scaled to both studio space sizes and degree of sophistication. The
company says that sound control is still not well understood by many,
and this way of organizing its packages helps both its customers and
sales staffs learn how various products work in unison within different
configurations. For instance, the Roominators Deluxe Plus Kit includes
24 Studiofoam 2-foot x 2-foot x 2-inch Wedge Panels, eight LENRD Bass
Traps and T’Fusor 3D Sound Diffusors. The larger Alpha-DST Roominators
Kit is aimed at rooms with 100 square feet or more of floor space and
includes 64 absorption panels and four LENRD-DST Bass Traps.

RPG Diffusor Systems’ signature product, the Diffusor, is found in
multimillion-dollar recording and concert facilities throughout the
world, including The Hit Factory, Sony Music and Carnegie Hall. This
box-framed set of slatted panels diffuses sound by breaking up the
waves it travels in, thereby avoiding the buildup of standing waves
that can distort the perception of the sound’s content. Stock diffuser
panels with gypsum or other materials for the slats can cost upwards of
$1,000 each; custom-made ones using more exotic materials such as
ceramics and specialized glass go for considerably more. But as RPG’s
management watched other pro audio tool makers democratize the market,
the company made what Jeff Madison, RPG’s pro audio sales manager,
agreed was a radical shift in strategy: it created a department to
address the growing middle of the pro audio market. The pro audio
division, which supplies the musical instrument and technology retail
sector (at stores like B&H), joined RPG’s studio, architectural,
audiophile and home theater departments.

"We developed an entire line of [acoustical] foam, which is the most
cost-effective tool [a studio can have], and dedicated it to project
studios," says Madison. "We also started to release more cost-effective
diffuser products, which are our flagship product. We now have two that
are packaged in with the foam line." RPG’s down-market diffusers cost
as little as $200 for a pair of panels.

Ethan Winer, owner of RealTraps, which makes ready-made acoustical
products that absorb the excess energy generated by bass frequencies,
says diffusion is a good solution for larger spaces, but absorption
handles smaller spaces better. "All acoustic problems are caused by
reflections," he says without doubt, lobbing the kind of philosophical
pronouncement that often spurs lengthy and passionate debates. "Smaller
rooms tend to have problems with low-frequency response, developing
nulls [drop-outs or significant attenuations] between 60 Hz and 100 Hz.
Much of it depends on how far the rear wall is from the monitoring
position."

Winer says nulls as large as -25 dB are not only common but also
typical. The graph, left, shows the low-frequency response measured in
a typical 16 x 10 x 8-foot untreated room. A pair of Mackie HR824
loudspeakers were against the front wall with the tweeters at ear
level, and the measuring microphone was placed precisely at the mix
position. Note the peak/dip pair at 110 and 122 Hz where the response
varies a substantial -32 dB.

Winer says the variety of small-room configurations lends itself to
what he calls a "universal solution:" broadband absorption treatments
(wall appliquà©s and trapping) through as low a frequency as possible.
"It’s not a tunable solution," he says. "But then, it doesn’t need to
be. What rooms like these are looking for are cost-effective, easily
installable solutions that address a lot of issues at once. Trying to
identify every null in a room is overkill in these situations." Winer
suggests a minimum of four bass traps for most rooms, at $200 per trap.
The company sells a basic room kit with various-sized traps for $1,900.

How you monitor your sound is yet another philosophical minefield. As
speakers have grown smaller to fit into desktop environments,
technology has made them more efficient and cost-effective. But there
are physical limitations here, as well. How a speaker reproduces low
frequencies becomes, like the room itself, a function of size. The size
of the main speaker (woofer) and the mechanics of the enclosures that
house them make the difference.

Desktop-sized speakers are available from a wide variety of
manufacturers. Even professional video editing facilities, often just
as cramped for space, are turning to prosumer-grade speakers to achieve
good sound in small spaces. These systems include the Cambridge SW FPS
2000 Digital, the Labtec APX-4620, Microsoft’s Digital Sound System 80,
the Sonigistix Monsoon MM-1000, the VideoLogic Sirocco, and Yamaha’s
YST MS28. Prices for these speakers range from $100 to $400. Choosing
speakers is, fundamentally, a subjective process. But the simultaneous
explosion of smaller video-editing spaces and home theaters has moved
the subwoofer into an increasingly central role in the monitoring
process, especially in small audio studios. Blue Sky International, an
offshoot of Group One Ltd. and Audio Design Labs, based in Farmingdale,
NY, has created systems that target the multimedia professional,
asserting music studio quality in very small enclosures with full
bandwidth down to 20 Hz via a subwoofer in either 2.1 (stereo and sub)
or 5.1 (surround and sub) configurations. At about $1,000, Blue Sky’s
MediaDesk product is specifically named and marketed to the higher end
of the pro desktop market. Company vice president Chris Fichera notes
that cable network G4 (formerly Tech TV), which often reviews video
games, recently purchased two dozen such systems for their
post-production facility, in part to accommodate smaller editing "pods"
but also to match the types of speakers game developers like Electronic
Arts increasingly install in their in-house studios. "If someone is
sitting in a 15 x 10 space and has to make decisions about low
frequencies, it can’t be done without a subwoofer," says Fichera.

Not everyone agrees. RealTraps’ Ethan Winer believes that crossover
systems are often inaccurate. When the crossover point-the split point,
expressed in frequency, between speakers and subwoofer-is set too high,
as it often is in systems with smaller speakers, it can distort the
overall accuracy of the system. "The Dolby specification for the the
sub is 80 Hz," he explains. "But some of the smaller satellite systems
have their crossover set at 200 Hz or even 300 Hz. That’s a lot of
localizable energy coming out of the sub." As a result, Winer tends to
favor speaker systems with a larger integrated woofer, which typically
cost more than $1,000, that can get down to at least 40 or 50 Hz.

That draws fire from Blue Sky’s Fichera, who counters that bass
management-a more precise method in which you dial in frequency
crossover points-defeats that problem. On top of that, he says, this
more precise approach to bass management is already offered by a number
of pro audio manufacturers, including Blue Sky, Genelec and Dynaudio.
"Bass management is the key to putting a point-one system in a small
space," he says. "Besides, since the trend is toward smaller
workspaces, it’s near impossible to mount a three-way speaker on the
desktop alongside your DAW."

David Frangione, president of equipment reseller and design/integrator
company Audio One, takes a more pragmatic approach. While room size is
key, and speaker choice remains subjective, he says it’s more important
to decide what kind of audio recording or post you intend to do in your
studio before you invest in speakers of any kind. "If you want to
maximize the end result of the space, you need to first determine the
most important task that will take place there. In other words, are you
going to mix in the room? Spot sound effects? Cut voiceovers? Optimize
the room for the application and treat the room accordingly. These
days, the choice of small speakers (with or without a sub) are
plentiful-and you don’t have to dedicate a lot of real estate in order
to get wide frequency response out of a speaker."

Once you choose monitors, how you position them is critical. Ethan
Winer suggests placing the speakers at different distances from the
front wall to see which yields the smoothest sounding bass response.
"If your room is small, you may have no choice but to put the speakers
flat against the wall," he says. "That’s perfectly acceptable, and many
active monitors include switches to compensate for this placement. But
if you have a few feet to work with, spacing the speakers a few feet in
front of the wall often improves the response."

Ergonomics, or the user’s spatial relationship to the speakers, is also
critical when setting up a small studio. Regardless of the space’s
dimensions, you need to create an equilateral triangle, with you at the
center tip and either speaker at the other points, that puts you as far
as possible from the surrounding walls (see diagram, page 66). Putting
the mix position slightly forward of the halfway point in this triangle
yields the flattest low-end response. The ideal speaker height puts the
tweeters level with your ears.

Last but by no means least, always minimize any extra hookups between
your speakers and your desktop or console. "Sound travels through solid
materials faster than through air, so when loudspeakers are sitting on
a desk, low frequencies can [be conducted] from the speaker’s enclosure
[mechanically] through the desk and floor and arrive at your ears
before the [airborne sound] waves do," says Winer. If the secondary
path is strong enough, the phase shift caused by this time delay
contributes to low-frequency response errors. One solution is to buy
speaker-isolation pads or "feet," sold for just this purpose. You can
optionally make pads from rigid fiberglass or even non-drying kitchen
sponges.

Until the real estate bubble bursts and facility rents get easier to
pay, small is here to stay in recording and post. Learning to make the
most of what you’ve got, especially when it comes to audio, is crucial
to turning your average sound suite into a sweet sounding creative
haven.

"Any device worthy of the name bass trap will have substantial absorption at 300 Hz and lower-hopefully much lower," says Ethan Winer of RealTraps. Why bother trapping such low frequencies? Dial in the local oldies station on the car radio sometime. "You’re likely to hear all sorts of low-frequency garbage down there," says Winer. Records made in the 1950s and‘60s were done in recording studios whose mixing monitors were usually not on a par with contemporary automotive sound systems. Analog tape running at 30 ips on a well-calibrated Studer or Ampex multitrack deck could record a lot of low-frequency information that the monitors were incapable of reproducing. Winer cautions that the same scenario could happen when high-definition formats, such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD, become the standard for prerecorded audio. "Down the line, someone will hear the low-frequency information you didn’t pay attention to now," he says.

In the meantime, installing bass traps is an easy and inexpensive option. "You can buy four-foot bales of fluffy fiberglass, left in their plastic wrapper, and stack them in the corners of the room," Winer advises. "They’re big and ugly, but they perform reasonably well, especially at their price." Rigid fiberglass panels wrapped in cloth and set in room and ceiling corners, he says, are even better. "Commercial bass traps include foam corners, corner-mounted rigid fiberglass, and wood or fiberglass-based membrane traps. Many think bass traps should be tuned to specific frequencies based on the size of the room. But severe peaks and nulls exist in all rooms, at all frequencies. We’ve found that the best bass traps for all rooms are those that absorb the entire range of low frequencies."